Video streaming services are becoming an increasingly important part of most small businesses today. They offer a way of interacting with customers, clients, vendors, and even employees working remotely.

Video streaming is everywhere, from your office PC to your smartphone or tablet, to the conference room. Choosing the right video streaming service is an important decision for any company because so much potentially is depending upon the quality of services it provides.

You don’t want to annoy clients or even lose business because you relied on a free service that didn’t give you the quality or bandwidth your business needed. At the same time, most small businesses can’t afford to pay for the top of the line video streaming services that they might only use once in a while.

The best approach is to find some happy medium: A video streaming service that provides you with the dependability and quality you need but doesn’t break the bank.

Here then are six live streaming video platforms for you to choose from. Read more

Instagram — the little photo sharing app that lets you post photos of your kittens and vacation pictures — has suddenly become one of the biggest and most influential marketing tools on the Internet.

Why? Because of its popularity.

Instagram currently has more than 30 billion – that’s “billion” with a “B” – images and more than 300 million active users each month. The site generates an average of 70 million photos per day, or roughly 3 million images per hour.

The most amazing statistic of all? Just five years ago, Instagram didn’t even exist. But in that short period of time, the site has undergone significant growth in its user base and in nearly every demographic group. In other words, Instagram is a marketer’s dream come true.

As a social media tool, Instagram is more powerful than Facebook and Twitter combined when it comes to brand marketing. That’s because Instagram posts generate a per-follower engagement rate – or the amount of people who actually look at the content that is posted — of 4.21%. That’s 58 times more than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter.

To engage customers on Instagram, a business needs more than just great looking images. It also needs a thoughtful content strategy and a clearly defined brand identity based in visual creativity and effective customer engagement.

Visual social media offers unique strengths for telling compelling stories about your brand and business. To help you develop an effective Instagram strategy for building qualified leads, here are seven simple techniques you can use starting right away. Read more